Our Weekend

Since I am to play the organ for the service this morning some practice time was needed. I did go to the church twice to do that. Pictured here is the organ that I play on for Sunday service. You will notice that the keys are the reverse color of what you normally see on a keyboard. The reason is that this is a tractor organ. I think I am spelling that correctly. When you play a note, the key is attached to a string or wire that runs down and underneath the bench and up to the pipes that are behind where the organist sits. Then the pipe is opened and the sound comes out. It is a different feel to play it than most other organs or pianos. You can see some of the pipes and a different view of the keyboard in my new header layout.
On Saturday we went to the holiday parade. When my kids were growing up this was held in the morning. We used to participate when my son was in scouts and when they got older, they marched with their high school band in the parade. Somewhere along the way, the parade got changed to an evening event. People could decorate their floats and cars and whatever with lights.
This tower was at the top of a building near where we stood to watch the parade. I took it just before it got dark.
I had a hard time getting good pictures because it was too dark. The ones with lots of lights showed up better. This is one of the floats with lots of lights. It was mainly community groups participating in the parade. Like sports groups, dance studios, businesses, churches, schools, scout groups, 4-H groups and so one. It was a long parade. There seemed to be at least 3 car clubs so all the cars in those clubs made it long. I was surprised to see a PT Cruiser car club. That was the kind of car we rented on our last trip. Most of the cars were black, made it hard to get good pictures, even with the lights.
This car is from an older model car club of some kind. The lighter color helped to make it visible in the picture.

Our church participated in the parade for the first time. I managed to get a picture of them. I almost missed my chance to get the picture. Candy was tossed to the children along the parade route. One of the teens from our church noticed us standing there and handed us some candy too. I thought that was cool. We had a fun evening. I was glad we went to it instead of being stick in the mud folks and staying home. Rather actually, it would have been going home instead of attending the parade. We were in town already for me to practice at the church.

The only thing that disappointed us was the parents who failed to control their children. The kids kept edging further and further into the street, especially the ones across the street from us. They were goading the participants into tossing them candy. Also getting too far out into the street made it hard for the ones driving the cars and trucks pulling floats to avoid them. Many of them had to veer over towards us. Being dark, sometimes it was hard for the drivers to really watch for the kids and avoid them. Most of the parents over there were have a drink from a bar that was right there and yakking with each other and appearing to be totally oblivious about what their kids were doing. It is these kinds of things that makes me wonder what the world is coming to these days.